11. Prospective Seconde Mancella Amaryllis Cliff
11
P ROSPECTIVE S ECONDE M ANCELLA A MARYLLIS C LIFF
|6 DAYS UNTIL THE ASSURANCE|
Monster.
It’s not like the word is new to me. I hear it whispered wherever I go. When I make formal appearances, the name rips through the crowd like a shark in the water, chewing up any other perception of me like chum.
My father told me that was a good thing. If I’m strong, I keep us safe. If they think me brutal, they won’t attack or disobey. By becoming the monster, I prevent true monstrosities.
But… I never put that mask on with Silver. I was always me.
And he used the word anyway.
I throw myself into my room and slam the door behind me, gasping for breath.
I thought it would feel better to succeed at this ruse. I mean, everything went perfectly, didn’t it? So perfectly even Silver was fooled.
But there were too many parts of it that were real. The hatred in Vie’s eyes. The way her jabs were truly designed to hurt. The feeling of dropping her limp body at my feet and having everyone cheer, exulting in her death. I didn’t have to fake the sobs or the accusations I threw at my father, because everything leading up to them hit way too close to home.
I sink to the floor, rubbing the last of the tears off my face as my chest turns cold.
What if I’ve leaned too far into the illusion? What if I’ve put on this persona and, like my armor, it’s molded itself into my skin until you can’t tell one from the other?
What if I can’t take it off again? Will I have to play this part for the rest of my life?
And if I do… at some point will it stop being an act?
I’ve always thought it was the Citadel that made my father what he is now, that stripped away the kindness he used to show me when I was younger. But what if it was power? What if the same happens to me?
Pulling my knees against my chest, I balance my chin on my arms.
When it was all over, I ran to Silver because I needed someone to remind me that it was only pretend and I’m not that person. I needed to take the armor off before it suffocated me.
But it turns out the armor was all he ever saw.
What do I do now?
The clouds outside shift, transforming the shadows in my room, and a flash of metal on top of my bookcase catches my eye. I squint up at it.
It’s the saucepan I planted the starsprout in, nestled between a stack of textbooks and a figurine of a jeweled elephant.
I stare at it, sniffing noisily.
Then I haul myself up, drag over a chair, and stand on my tiptoes until I can grasp the handle and pull it down, because right now I could really use the reminder that I did save something. One starsprout. One little flower that I yanked from the earth in the dead of night to spare it from the inferno.
And a monster wouldn’t do that, would they?
But when I peek over the edge, the flower is wilting and the dirt is bone dry.
My stomach sinks and my eyes burn. I almost throw the entire pot at the wall.
Instead, with a white-knuckled grip, I drag the withered mess into my bathroom and draw some water.
I don’t know how much is the right amount, so I dribble careful, incremental portions until the dirt feels roughly as moist as the soil of the lawn felt when I buried my hands in it. And maybe it’s my imagination, but the little plant seems to perk up.
My shoulders relax and I clutch the saucepan in my lap, sitting cross-legged on the floor. The starsprout will be okay. I will be okay. Somehow.
I stroke one of the petals with my finger, and, as the animals within me brighten as well, I let out a handful of butterflies. They bat their jewel-toned wings and flutter around me. One of them lands gently on my nose, and I respond with a relieved smile as I watch its wings open and close, open and close.
“Well, you certainly look happy for a murderer.”
I jerk my head up, heart in my throat, to see Mara leaning against the doorframe.
I dismiss my butterflies and shove the crude flowerpot behind my back. The clouds move again, and a shadow falls across Mara’s scarf-covered face as she studies me.
“Um,” I say. “What happened was—”
“Save it,” she says. “We need to talk. My room. Now.”
My mouth snaps shut because Mara never invites me to her room. Or anyone. I’m not sure she’s let anybody in since the Broken Citadel. So when she pushes off the doorframe and heads for the hall, I stumble after her, wondering what this might mean.
When we get to her room, Mara swings the door wide and steps back, gesturing me forward. I oblige, but my steps are tentative. Entering feels like crossing some kind of metaphorical threshold.
We both live in towers, but while my room is like a showroom, frequently swept and carefully arranged, Mara’s is more… lived in. Probably because she long ago banned any of the maids from entering either.
The first thing I notice is the smell, tingling my nostrils. Like peppermint, sage, and burnt citrus.
The next thing I notice is how cluttered everything is. Every surface—and a fair chunk of the floor—is covered with a weird assortment of seemingly useless knickknacks. I see feathers, dried herbs, broken dolls, and yellowed papers. On one table there’s a pile of bracelets and busted locks. On another there’s a glass vial suspended above a candle, with some kind of dark amber liquid inside. I’m guessing that’s where the smell is coming from. And there are other casks and bottles scattered throughout the room as well, with liquids and powders in a variety of shades. Some are clear and light, like water but thicker, and others are as dark and crusty as dried blood.
But all of this I expected. She’s always been messy. She’s always collected odd, discarded things, only giving secretive smiles in answer when asked what they could possibly be for.
What I didn’t expect was the paintings on the walls. I walk to the center of the room and turn slowly, taking it all in.
On the wall to the left of the door, she’s depicted the mountain range in broad, deliberate strokes. The magic twists above it, eating away at the sky. She’s made its edges look like pointed teeth.
On the next wall, she’s painted the desert, the riven pieces of the Broken Citadel poking out of the sand, and the magic’s twisting mass within them. All the lines of the painting point inward, toward its glowing center, and the greens she’s used are so vivid and striking that I almost feel the same pull toward them that I did when I saw the real thing, when I struggled to avert my eyes. I tear my gaze away from it, but the next mural is worse.
The wall on the right side of the room, the one behind her bed, is painted completely black. Not the flat black that would come from only one coat and only one shade. It’s layered. It breathes. I don’t know how she did it, but it feels alive, like it might reach out and snatch me.
I stagger back, into a pile of lampshades, and send the stack of bracelets on the desk toppling.
“How can you sleep under that?” I ask.
“The same way you do,” she says matter-of-factly. “It’s there whenever you close your eyes, isn’t it? The blackness. And we have to hide it so much when we’re out there in the world. We have to smile and talk around it. So in this room, at the very least, I want to be honest. To stare into it without flinching. To say what I need to say to it whenever I need to say it.”
Her words make sense to me. They make sense, and yet I still can’t look at that wall. Nor can I fully turn my back on it. I stand at an angle, keeping it in the corner of my eye, my whole body tensed like the wall itself might attack.
I could never live in a room like this.
“So you wanted to talk?” I say nervously.
“I wanted to congratulate you,” she says.
I turn from the blackness to gape at her, though I still feel it prickling my scalp. “You want to congratulate me for my first real murder?”
“I want to congratulate you for finally playing the game,” she says. “Making the moves necessary to survive in this castle. It’s about time.”
I clench my fists. “I can’t believe how callous—”
She waves an impatient hand to dismiss my admonition. “You and I both know you didn’t kill that girl.”
The certainty in her voice makes my heart plummet. I make a feeble attempt to look surprised, but it must fall completely flat, because her one eye shoots me a glare and I deflate immediately.
“Was it that obvious?” I ask. “To… everyone?”
“Nah,” she says, walking toward the blackness. “I only knew something was up when that servant started having a panic attack. So when he ran off and you fled in the same direction, I told everyone to give you space and let me talk to you first. And then I followed you.”
I swallow. “How much did you see?”
She tilts her chin at me, assessing my reaction. Her dark hair blends in with the paint until it almost looks like it’s swallowing her. “The two of you running, the two of you disappearing into a hedge maze, and then, later, a dead girl and a soldier meeting up with that same servant. But even if I hadn’t seen any of that, your little butterflies-and-flowers act would have given you away pretty quickly. If you had actually killed someone, there’s no way you would’ve been able to smile like that so soon. And the whole walk over here you seemed perfectly fine, so… you’ll have to work on that.”
My stomach clenches as I realize she’s got a point. The act isn’t over. I’ll have to mope around for weeks to make this look realistic. I scrunch up my mouth and sink to the ground, dragging my hands down my face.
“There you go,” she says. “That’s much better.”
I chuck a pillow at her but she’s already moving, so it bounces harmlessly off the onyx-colored paint behind her. Part of me expected it to get sucked right in, and the fact that it didn’t gives me a small measure of nonsensical relief.
Meanwhile, Mara is moving things around on her bookshelf. “Here,” she says, gathering various plants and powders and measuring them out into an emptied makeup jar.
I peer through my fingers at her skeptically. “What is all that?” I ask.
She pours the now bright yellow mixture into a tiny cask and puts a stopper in it, then tosses it at me. I catch it in one hand.
“If you need to cry, that will irritate your glands,” she tells me. “Only use a little at a time. If you dose more than four times a day, you might go blind for a week or so. But as long as you use it appropriately, it should really help sell the act.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask, holding the bottle up to the light.
She shrugs. “You’re not the only one who’s needed to force a tear.”
I turn the vial over, watching the sediment in the bottom float to the top. I try to think of the last time I saw Mara cry so I can pick it apart for authenticity.
But I can’t even think of a single time.
Not since we were kids, anyway. Not since…
My eyes flick up to the Citadel and then away.
“Why would you need to—” I try.
But Mara shakes her head, cutting me off. “Don’t forget, you’ve only just stepped up to the board. I’ve already been playing this game for years. And anyway, I didn’t bring you here to talk about stuff like that. I just want you to… I don’t know, relax a little. Fortify yourself before you go back out there. With the Assurance coming up so soon, things are getting intense. But you don’t have to play in here.” To punctuate her point, she unfastens her scarf and peels it off, folding it over her hands in a practiced rhythm before hanging it up in the closet beside hundreds of others.
When she turns back, her face is bare, but her expression is sincere. I can’t help feeling that she’s telling me to lay my cards down even as she keeps hiding her own. But I force myself to loosen my shoulders and shove down my nerves anyway, because I do appreciate the gesture. I slip the tonic into my pocket and cross my legs underneath me, motioning for her to sit down, too.
As she does, my eyes skim over the weathered papers, the broken locks, and the bundles of herbs, before finally landing on the charred candle. The smell of the mixture above it still needles me, and I have to know.
“What’s that for?” I ask, pointing. “Father’s not still making you conduct those experiments, is he?”
Her expression turns grim as memories surface between us, like dead bodies floating to the top of a lake.
For the first several years after we returned from the Broken Citadel, Father tried to force Mara’s magic to manifest. He found some scholar from the Jungle Realm who told him about others whose magic was delayed, and how it usually took a traumatic event to trigger it.
So he’d stick her hand in a fire to see if she was resistant to flames. He’d stir poison into her breakfast to see if she was immune to it. One cold night I had to drag her out of the well in the garden because he’d tied a rock to her foot and thrown her in, hoping she could breathe underwater. I’ll never forget the cold, slimy feeling of her skin or the rasping, heaving coughs she made as I clutched her to my chest. I thought he’d stopped all that, but maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’s just gotten better at hiding it. Maybe—
“No,” she says, mouth drooping but voice forceful. “He gave up on me a long time ago. I use that for tea.” She gives me a watery smile. “Want some?”
I’m simultaneously relieved by her words and devastated by her phrasing. My stomach is churning, but I nod anyway. “Tea would be nice.”
She picks up one of the bags of herbs, which I now realize are tea leaves, and dumps it into a beaker of fresh water, swapping this with the stale one above the candle. Then she strikes a match and holds the fire to the wick. Once the tea is steeping, she pulls some crackers and jams out of the stand by her bedside and holds them out.
“We might as well make a meal of it,” she says. “I’d rather not find out if Father tries to serve orphan for dinner tonight.”
I snort, accepting the tin she hands me, and we sit side by side on the floor to share our makeshift dinner.
But no matter how light our conversation is or how sweet the lemon and lavender curd we spread on our buttery crackers might be, I never stop noticing the blackness on the wall. I remember sitting in this same room with Mara when we were younger, staying up late and giggling freely. There were never any secrets then. There were no shadows seeping in.
But so much has changed, and although the chat we share now is pleasant, it’s not the same. It can’t be, not when it takes place against the background of that enveloping, all-consuming blackness.
Still, I feel like the magic has taken enough from me already, and I won a victory against it today. I kept my control even when its bloodlust surged. I didn’t kill, and now I won’t have to. So no matter how uncomfortable that mural makes me, I don’t leave. I stay until the wall matches the sky outside. And then I stay even longer, until stars begin to make the darkness softer.